A contributed analysis on the failure of the `western left` to recognize the enemy and its methods, and to willingly be seduced in order to help destroy socialism, democracy and popular resistance in the non-white world.

Paper given at the First Annual Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi Day
School, at the Dublin Offices of the Irish Republican Socialist Party,
33 Gardiner Place, Dublin, on the 20th of October, 2012.

The "Arab Spring" and The Seduction of the Western Left

I wish to claim, in this paper, that the invasion of Libya set a new
precedent in the co-option of Western Left into imperialist
adventurism. Following the work of Jean Baudrillard, I will claim that
the method used was the age old method of seduction.

The failure of anti-war movements to stop war is nothing new. There
has never been a case of protest movements stopping a war. Even the
Vietnam War, which eventually generated massive protests in the USA, was
not halted by these protests, but only by the actual defeat of the US
war machine in the field. In 1912, the Socialist parties met in Basle,
Swizerland, to promise that they would not support their governments if
war were to begin. But, once the patriotic drums of WW1 began to beat,
these promises were forgotten, and most Socialist leaders, or
mis-leaders, shamefully encouraged the Working Class youth of Europe out
to the slaughter.

For all this catalogue of failure, there has been a
consistant and active anti-war movement, funded by the Left, in Europe
and the USA, all down the decades. In 2003, half a million people
marched in Washington against the Iraq War. Almost a million people
marched in London. In many ways, a dramatic success. Of course, the
war was not stopped, but, it can be claimed that the imperialist
propaganda machine was severely weakened by such massive display of
public rejection. Next time, the imperialists were going to have to be a
lot smarter, a lot more seductive – and they were.

Of course, once the attack on Libya had begun, the Western media did
what was always expected from it, and it generated and propagated the
most wild propaganda against the Libya government and its leader that
they could concoct. We had the laughable stories about Al Gaddafi
giving Viagra to the Libyan Army, so that Libyan soldiers could go about
raping peaceful protesters – a story picked up and repeated by Amnesty
International. This story was straight out of the German soldiers
eating Belgian babies catalogue – or the Iraqi soldiers throwing babies
out of 500 Kuwaiti incubators, even though there were only about 50
incubators in all of Kuwait at the time (again, a story picked up and
repeated by Amnesty International.)

Laughable as these stories are in
hindsight, during the media frenzy for enemy blood, they are taken
seriously by huge sections of the population, and they serve to weaken
any attempt to criticise or oppose the war. From the very first days of
the so called uprising in Benghazi, stories began to leak into the
"better" Western newspapers, such as the Guardian, of the rounding up of
Black people and their torture, lynching and burning to death. However,
Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, began to refer to the Black people
being slaughtered as Sub-Saharan mercenaries. So, that was all right
then. The media had its fig leaf for supporting racist genocide. For
all that, there were constant reports in the better newspapers (none of
them Irish) of the disturbing fact that most of those being slaughtered
were not in the military. They were, in fact, Black civilians, many of
them migrant workers.

So, what was the reaction of the Western Left to all of this? The
reaction was even more shameful than that of 1914, when the Working
Class were betrayed by those who had promised them principled
leadership. At least the various Socialist leaderships, in 1914, could
claim that their nations were under attack. The Western Left had no
such excuse in 2011, when Libya was being attacked. Here we had a small
nation, of only six million people, under attack from the most
devastating military power alliance ever put together in the history of mankind.

The killing power ranged
against Libya in 2011, was greater than anything that had been put in
the field in either of the World Wars, or the Vietnam War. 120 Cruise
missiles fired in the first few days, and then over 25,000 sorties by
NATO military aircraft, over a nine month period. And all through, the
Western Left cheered on the smashing of the Socialist state
infrastructure and cheered on the racist lynch mobs.

Even the noted
thinker, Noam Chomsky, became a cheerleader for racist lynch mobs –
downplaying the role of the Salafist gangs, and claiming that the
rebellion was essentially peaceful. The Irish Anti-War Movement called
for the freezing of Libyan state assets – used to pay for schools,
hospitals, etc. – and for the using of these vital social funds to arm
the so-called National Transitional Council (NTC), a tiny group of
unknowns, who had spent the previous two decades in the USA, being
groomed by the CIA to take power in Libya, and turn Libya into a US
puppet state, with a privatization agenda.

How could such a thing
happen? How could the moral compass of the Western Left have collapsed,
so disastrously, since 2003, when massive demonstrations had been
organized to oppose war against Iraq – a state with an infinitely worse
human rights record than Libya (which was about to receive an award for
Human Rights from the UN, only a few months before the invasion.) In
the case of the Iraq War, all the usual media propaganda ploys had been
used. Saddam was a brutal dictator. Certainly true. Saddam was a
danger to his own people. Very often true. And then, to cap it all,
Saddam was going to attack the West with Weapons of Mass
Destruction. Complete bullshit, but effective enough on the minds of
those who actually watch Fox News or CNN, which is, tragically, the
majority of people. But for all that, the Left held its nerve, and
organized massive protests against the war.

So, how could one imagine that by 2011, this same Left, would have
become the cheerleaders for a genocidal, racist, campaign against a
Socialist state, with one of the highest standards of living in the
Developing World, and with a human rights record that was gaining
widespread praise in the UN? Not to mention an advanced system of Direct
Democracy.

Seduction

At this point, we must discuss the art of seduction. As Baudrillard
points out, in his book called Seduction, seduction is a play on
fantasy. It is a promise, a false promise, to give the seduced his or
her deepest wish, to make the fantasy come true. Usually, as Freud
makes clear, we are dealing with primal fantasies, i.e. the fantasy of
seeing and being part of that scene which we were, as children, so
cruelly excluded from, i.e. the lovemaking of our parents. And what is
the primal scene of the Western Left? What is that scene of joy and
release that we are forever excluded from. None other than the storming
of the Winter Palace in 1917. We are forever under the spell of Sergei
Eisenstein’s great Soviet film, October 1917. The marching Workers in
their tens of thousands, the police and soldiers disobeying their
orders, and joining the Workers, as they valiantly march on the Tsar’s
palace of power.

It doesn't matter that very little of all this actually
happened, and that Eisenstein created a vision of the Storming of the
Winter Palace that was a tribute to his own genius, rather than the
facts of that night. None of that matters. For the last 90 odd years,
we have been trying to recreate that primal scene, with our pathetic
pickets and marches – where the organizers don’t even dare to mention
overthrowing the bourgeois state, not to mind actually doing it. But
then, all of a sudden, the Western Left was given everything it had ever
fantasized about. Hundreds of thousands of people in Tunisia and
Egypt, taking to the streets – just like in the movie – seeming to
topple the dictators. What joy! For years we had been told that this
sort of thing had died with Lenin. But, here it was, right before our
eyes. And if the Arab countries could do it – so could we. Occupy Wall
Street. Sure, didn’t it work in Tahrir Square?

And then Benghazi came on our TV screens. The people, rising up
against a dictator. This was all too good to be true – but why look
such a wonderful gift horse in the mouth? We need it to work, so we can
show our own people, here in Europe, that it really can be done.

Seduction is not rape. It needs the complicity of its victim. It needs
the victim to want to be seduced. Indeed, it is the victim that
dictates the terms on which the seduction will take place. The Arab
Spring happened, because this was how the Western Left wanted to be
seduced.

It is often noted that TV News only became popular after colour TV
came into being. The Vietnam War was a black and white war. People
could not bear to look at it. Black and white seduces. Black and white
is always something less than reality. Seduction is always something
less than reality. It leaves something to be desired. You cannot see
the picture, unless you fill in the gaps, unless you become complicit in
the creation of the picture. Black and white draws you into the middle
of the horror. Black and white is always horrific, always
seductive. Colour is not like that. It is too real. It is more than
reality. It leaves nothing to the imagination. It leaves nothing to be
desired. One can sit quite happily in front of a colour TV, watching
the mutilated bodies of children, while you eat your TV dinner. Because
you are not implicated, you are not seduced, you are excluded from the
horror – pushed away from it, by the excess of information.

Baudrillard wrote a book called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. He
analyses the way that the extreme media overdose of information leaves
the TV viewer with a total sense of unreality. This is war reduced to
the level of a computer game. For the Western viewer, no real person is
being killed or hurt. All that is happening is that images are being
created. Even the US sodiers in Iraq rarely saw the murderous result of
their actions. They too saw the war through their video equipment.

Black and White

While the Gulf War was a colour TV war, it could be said that the
Arab Spring was in seductive black and white. When the violence broke
out in Benghazi, in February 2011, the Libyan government invited
international observers and media to travel to Benghazi to see what was
happening. Very few took up the offer. That was not the plan. Tunisia
and Egypt had nicely set the scene, and the imperialist powers had no
intention of disturbing that scene with the truth of violent, racist,
Salafist, gangs in collaboration with the CIA and the Gulf
dictatorships, murdering ordinary police and soldiers and any Black
person they could get their hands on.

As Baudrillard pointed out, seduction always takes something away
from the scene – the scene of pleasure. The “Arab Spring” was masterful
work, worthy of any Don Juan. Without having any real idea of who or
what these “rebels” were, the Western Left became complicit. They were
sucked in. Joyfully sucked in. They filled out the missing spaces with
their fantasies of democratic protesters, valiantly standing up to the
Viagra drugged soldiers of a hated dictator. That a million Libyans
came out and filled Green Square, under the threat of NATO bombing, to
show their support for Muammar al-Gaddafi was easily overlooked. A
seduced person, a person who is loving the thrill of being seduced, no
longer has any use for truth or facts.

And so, even after the brutal murder of Muammar al-Gaddafi, by drone
and fighter jet attack, and then by a crazed mob, the madness of the
Western Left continued. They continued to dream of Tahrir Square
spontaneously breaking out all over Europe and the US - even as the
Fascist Muslim Brotherhood put their claws on the strings of power in
Egypt, and began to serve US interests to an even more servile degree
than Mubarak had done.

Even today, after the total failure of the Occupy Movements to
achieve anything, there are still some deluded, ever seduced, idiots in
the Western Left, who are supporting the CIA \ Mossad sectarian gangs in
Syria.

Renewed Conquest of Africa

So, where does that leave us now?

In 1873, the Western capitalist
system was crushed by a massive financial collapse. Nothing within that
system could supply the vast amounts of real wealth that would serve to
restore that system. The answer was very simple. In 1873, very little
of Africa, Asia or North America was under imperialist rule. The next
ten years saw the most genocidal imperialist expansion ever known.

All
of North America was conquered, and the naive population
exterminated.

The Scramble for Africa included the unspeakable horror
of the Belgian rape of the Congo, with, at least, 13 million people
murdered, and also included the genocidal conquest of southern Africa by
Cecil Rhodes, funded by the criminal Rothschild family, and done in the
bloody name of the British empire.

By the 1890s, the collapse of
Western capitalism had been turned into an unprecedented boom, and the
stage was set for WW1, as the burgeoning empires greedily eyed up each
others conquests.

In the 1930s, Germany and Japan tried to lift
themselves out of crippling economic depression by embarking on colonial
conquests. WW2 was the result. And we remember the the Great
Depression did not end in the USA until the opening of WW2, and the
transfer of the entire gold reserve of the British empire to the USA, as
payment for arms, etc.

Today, Western capitalism faces an even more
catastrophic collapse than in 1873. Once again, it has embarked on the
conquest of Africa, and the subjugation of China, as the answer to its
crisis. The first step was the murder of the man, who above all others,
stood for African unity in the face of imperialist domination – Colonel
Muammar al-Gaddafi.

Syria is under attack, as a step towards the
invasion of Iran - a step that Russia and China cannot allow, without
accepting their own impending destruction. In effect, we are facing the
beginning of WW3, to be fought for exactly the same reason as the first
two World Wars were fought, i.e. as an attempt to escape a financial
collapse in the Capitalist system.

Can we look to the leaders of the Western Left with confidence? What
would such a leadership even consist of?

It seems obvious that we need
leaderships that are capable of overcoming their catastrophic seduction
in 2011. We need to openly admit that the Left was utterly wrong in
its analysis, and was outflanked by an enemy with hugely greater skills
then the Left now generally possesses. We must begin to weed out the
rotten from the good. We need people who understand that this is a
fight to the death with an enemy that will never stop – until he is
stopped for good. We need people who are not moved by the hysteria of
the majority. Who openly state that the majority are often, if not
usually, completely wrong. Superstitious reverence for representational
democracy must go, and an all out war on the bourgeois media must
begin.

The church is finished as a political power, but the bourgeois
media has taken its place. It is this place that must be smashed – not
just the last holder of it. Above all, we must link with the genuine
Revolutionaries in India, Nepal, South America and Africa. Their fight
is our fight. The puppets that the second “Arab Spring” brought to
power (the first Arab Spring was used to smash the Ottoman Empire after
WW1, and install British and US puppets in the Arab world), these latest
puppets must be smashed. We must continue the great work begun by
Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi. The Green Banner must fly beside the Red
Banner.

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